Liliana submitted:

From the Steam side-scroller game “Akane the Kunoichi”. Because badass ninjas have to wear sideboob bikinis… so long as they have those ever-important shoulder plates!

I’d like to say that it’s rather disturbing that this game got past the Greenlight process, it means there were a lot of people who expressed a desire to play it!  The use of the heavily sexualised artwork to promote this game is kind of amazing, given that there’s also some attempt to sell it up as a role reversal game:

You are Akane, a Kunoichi ninja secretely loving her master Goro, a noble samurai. One day Goro is kidnapped by the evil Hiromi – you have to rescue him, but it won’t be an easy task!

Then there’s the fact that the sexy artwork version is neither wearing anything resembling Japanese clothing* or what the chibi figure is wearing:

And apparently (the video doesn’t confirm it and even >$3.00 this game is not worth the price), the creator decided that instead of using boring love hearts or something to show how many lives you have left… they’d go with ugly kimonos (which also look nothing like what the main character wears).

So you don’t die… you just lose a set of clothes… that you weren’t wearing anyway… that’s not creepy!

What’s that? I can already hear apologists frantically typing their responses that perhaps we shouldn’t be too hard on this game – it’s probably a good game and this is just harmless fun! (And the developer says it’s “critically acclaimed”)

I cannot stress enough, if you promote a game by using images of “sexy” armor that provides zero protection (I’m not even going to try to Bingo that thing), particularly if you’re an Indy game with very limited resources, you send a clear message about your priorities.  And it’s not a good message.  Not at all.

If you want to make a game with a female protagonist, make the female protagonist someone we can actually view as a person rather than a sex object. There’s no shortage of fap material on the Internet, there is however a dire shortage of games with awesome female protagonists.

– wincenworks

* This is probably because despite the desperate attempts to appear Japanese with the company name and imagery, the game creator is actually from Rome, Italy.  So add cultural exotification to the list offences too!